Reverse Bounty

A "reverse bounty" is a concept I was discussing at the 2005 Drupal conference. Bounties are a fairly well known concept within the open source world: users post bounties in order that bugs get fixed or features get added.

The main issue with this is that it is user driven, and end users often don't have any concept of how easy or hard something is to implement -- or even what might be possible given the platform.

Reverse bounties are instead posted by developers. It is an idea and feature description of something that the developer actually wants to work on, along with the money required. The developer knows that it can be done, knows what the platform can do, and has the skills to actually implement it. The money allows them to dedicate time to actually work on it.